columnists

Biography

Brian Lee Crowley is the Managing Director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a national public policy think tank based in Ottawa. Before that he was the founding president of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS), where he remains a Senior Fellow. At different times he has been Clifford Clark Visiting Economist at Finance Canada, a member of the Editorial Board at The Globe and Mail, a tenured professor at Dalhousie University and a constitutional negotiator for Manitoba (Meech Lake) and Nova Scotia (Charlottetown). He is the author of numerous books and articles and has degrees from McGill and the London School of Economics.

Few things enrage the critics of the government of Stephen Harper more than its supposed tendency to make policy in the teeth of contrary evidence provided by experts. Not only is this treated as shameful in itself, but the sin is apparently compounded by the idea that the government might ignore “evidence” in order to cater to its “base.”